Potato, Po-ta-to: Reconstructing Metabolism

Experiments and a sculpture with potato goo and different decomposing materials.

Presented at Väre, Aalto University, in Otaniemi 2019.
 

‘’Life is a connected phenomenon through space. There’s no independent organism cause every organism requires food to be delivered and waste to be removed. So that it’s a system on the surface of the earth.’’ - Lynn Marqulis, biologist and evolutionary theorist.
 

Potato, po-ta-to: Reconstructing Metabolism was a process that explored the topic of symbiosis through experimental design and literature research. The process led me to an intention to address the distance that has grown between the subject and the task, as well as the action and its unwanted or unacknowledged consequences. How we have come to build and maintain our lives in an unsustainable manner, as anthropocentric social animals, and how we have learned through different sets of reciprocal projections to separate the I or us in order to reduce ’’the other’’ into a mere resource, to justify their exploitation as ''survival of the fittest'' or as something ”less than human”.

My aim was to reduce and remove waste by exploring the topic of domination as a form of parasitism and through hands-on working with decomposing materials, instead of interfering the metabolism by thriving for permanence.
The material focus was on potato starch as the edible tuber of a plant and a fruit of labor, that my human hands first forced into a somewhat forgotten tool in the form of glue, and then used as beetroot dyed goo in an attempt to portray the collective shadow that we cast while intending to create light in our increased appetite for growth and advantages to fulfill our basic needs. Those needs that like almost all else, seem to have become distorted and turned into commodities in this complex system built for and by us.